No Tmi Restart

May 29, 1985|The Morning Call

To the Editor:

Don Ritter and the Three Mile Island nuclear plant operators called for the restart of TMI Unit 1 at Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearings on May 22. At the same hearing Pennsylvania's governor, U.S. senators and two other members of the U.S. House delegation called for further hearings before a decision would be made on restart.

All the efforts of GPU, Met-Ed and the NRC to hide the realities of the TMI tragedy are alone enough to make most of us leery of this same crew making decisions about the nuclear plant next door to a highly radioactive waste heap, TMI Unit 1. Just two of several recent developments regarding TMI should give even Don Ritter pause.

1) Between 1980 and 1984 seven times the normal number of cancer deaths have occurred among the people who lived under the radioactive plume released from TMI in 1979, according to a health study done by Norman and Marjorie Aamodt.

2) After the recent reports that nuclear fuel did melt during the TMI accident, reaching temperatures of 5,100 degrees Fahrenheit, some experts now conclude that extremely hazardous radioactive materials like plutonium and americium reached areas beyond the plant.

We can only be ashamed that the Lehigh Valley's representative would so betray humane values as to advocate the further psychological suffering and physical health risks that the reopening of TMI Unit 1 would mean for the people of middle Pennsylvania.